RAL Tier1 weekly operations castor 28/06/2019

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Standing agenda

1. Achievements this week

2. Problems encountered this week

3. What are we planning to do next week?

4. Long-term project updates (if not already covered)

5. Special topics

6. Actions

7. Review Fabric tasks

  1.   Link

8. AoTechnicalB

9. Availability for next week

10. On-Call

11. AoOtherB

Achievements this week

• Started deletion of LHCb data from lhcbDst
• Started repermissioning of SNO+ data in response to GGUS
• Renamed some MICE data in response to a request.

Operation problems

• Unscheduled Facilities downtime this week
  • On Wednesday, Fabric intervened to replace a PDU board on rack 88 (which contains the Facilities headnodes)
  • Also on Thursday (at about 11), an intervention was made on fdsclsf05 to replace some memory and fix the power supply
  • At 11:12, networking connectivity was lost to many (but not all) Facilties machines.
    • We believe this was related to someone jogging a network cable during the hardware intervention.
    • Facilities admins raised the alarm and the Fabric team investigated.
  • At 11:46, connectivity to all the machines except fdscstg05 came back.
    • Fdscstg05 needed a new power supply on Friday; we think this was probably the reason for that machine's issue.
  • After lunch, fdscstg05 was restarted and it started working again.
  • We then tested the service and ended the downtime
• We also had problems this week with SRM transfers failing for CMS and LHCb
  • Lots of transfers timing out and SAM tests failing.
  • DB team also reported high DB load from the SRM
  • Logs were full of activity from a particular T2K user.
  • We think the problem was that this T2K user was treating the SRM very roughly and hitting it with a very many requests.
  • When they were asked to stop the problem went away.
• More drives than expected down in Facilities during a busy period.

Plans for next few weeks

• Decommissioned lhcbDst; hardware awaiting retirement.
• Kevin has done some storageD functional tests with the new tape robot
• Brian C is currently testing StorageD/ET on the new robot
• Replace Facilities headnodes with VMs.
  • Waiting until Kevin is back from holiday.
  • Scheduled for the 30th July.

Long-term projects

• Migration of name server to VMs on 2.1.17-xx is waiting until aliceDisk is decommissioned.
• CASTOR disk server migration to Aquilon.
  • Need to work with Fabric to get a stress test (see above)
• Facilties headnode replacement:
  • SL7 VM headnodes need changes to their personalities for the facilities.
  • SL7 headnodes are being tested by GP
• Implementing DUNE on Spectralogic robot is paused.
• Migrate VCert to VMWare.
• Move VCert into the Facilities domain so we have a facilities test instance.

Actions

• AD wants us to make sure that experiments cannot write to that part of namespace that was used for d1t0 data: namespace cleanup/deletion of empty dirs.
  • Some discussion about what exactly is required and how this can be actually implemented.
  • CASTOR team proposal is either:
    • to switch all of these directories to a fileclass with a requirement for a tape copy but no migration route; this will cause an error whenever any writes are attempted.
    • to run a recursive nschmod on all the unneeded directories to make them read only.
    • CASTOR team split over the correct approach.
• Problem with functional test node using a personal proxy which runs out some time in July.
  • RA met with JJ, requested an appropriate certificate.
  • Follow up with JJ or ST next week

Staffing

• Everybody in

On Call

RA on call